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The Oceanaire Seafood Room: fine dining’s ketchup-bottle problem
A seafood supper club began with a small lesson in making guests feel welcome. Its history shows how much depends on the room, the catch and the customer’s willingness to celebrate.
Cattlemens changes the address. Keeps the steak.
The family-owned California steakhouse has spent 58 years making dinner feel familiar. Behind the cowboy décor is a business willing to move, rebuild and find its next neighborhood.
The Restaurant Group That Refuses to Look Like a Chain
BOKA built a national hospitality business by making each restaurant feel singular. Behind the scenes, a shared operating machine lets chefs, designers and service teams do the visible work.
Smith
Smith is an Asbury Park-based hospitality group that grew out of a 1990s branding and design studio. Beginning in 2006 with Brickwall Tavern, its partners helped restart a stalled downtown, then built a collective of restaurants and bars - Porta, Pascal & Sabine, Homesick, and Lovesick - that pair scratch kitchens with art-filled rooms. Smith treats hospitality as an instrument of urban renewal, designing, branding, and operating each venue in-house.